[In the following review of Journals Mid-Fifties, Theroux argues that the journals are often dull and reveal little of Ginsberg's life.]

A pile of pages, scribbled odds and ends, Allen Ginsberg's Journals Mid-Fifties (1954–1958), the thoughts and observations of a young would-be poet between ages 28 and 32, are nothing like the polished records of Virginia Woolf, James Boswell or Anais Nin, certainly nothing like the studied and deliberate journals of Hawthorne or Henry James.

"The instigation for getting things together, finding all these old notebooks," writes Ginsberg, who back in the early '50s "thought it would be a good idea to keep track of it all"—the social foment, new consciousness and hip restlessness of the "Beat" movement—"was the advantage of having apprentices at Naropa during the mid-seventies, late seventies, and...